Well, I was wrong about there not being anything up here today apart from links to me on Samizdata, because here is the latest recorded conversation between me and Antoine, about democracy and libertarianism.  It’s just under forty minutes in length.  And I did manage to get this up before our end-of-the-month deadline.

It’s more abstract and vague and less dependent upon recent events than usual, and my sense is that this didn’t really work.  Normally, if people think something in the blogosphere is not very good, they are sane and polite enough just to move on in silence.  But here is a case where I would really like to know what you thought, even if you thought it rather poor, and particularly if you thought it poor and usually like the chats that Antoine and I do rather more.  And, of course, I would be equally interested if you thought it was fine, or even better than usual.  In fact, any general advice about how Antoine and I should go about these things would be greatly appreciated.

I also have in the can the conversation that Alex and I had about Gilbert and Sullivan.  This felt far better to me, because we had both done some homework.  But alas, technically there were problems, with me being much quieter than Alex.  Further work will be needed before that sees the light of day.  Live and learn.

Anyway, I mention that G&S chat because I think that homework is a good idea for these things, especially when it’s with the same person again and again and there isn’t the simple fact of meeting a new person to keep things lively.  Each time, we need to really get to grips with a new subject, but alas, this time, as we joked afterwards rather ruefully, this was something of a “quota podcast”.

I think that Antoine and I need to decide on our topic not hours before, but a couple of weeks before.  That way, we keep our eyes and ears peeled for relevant stories, and generally learn some good stuff in advance, like I did about G & S.

Like I say, live and learn.

Nothing other than this here today, but I have just done a couple of bits for Samizdata, about the coming world of total surveillance, and about a posting by Rob Fisher.

There’s a beautiful set of 2006 retrospective photos taken by Michael Jennings, from all over the world, and displayed for all the world to see at Samizdata.

My favourites are Shanghai, ancient in the foreground and ultra-modern looming up in the background, and the Barcelona sculpted bench, presumably by Gaudi.

My least favourite is, obviously, the final one, of the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

Lots of signs.  Signs are, in my opinion, an underrated resource to the photographer.  A picture, says the boring slogan, is worth a thousand words.  Nonsense, on the whole, I would say, because it suggests a false choice that you actually don’t have to make between the two.  Pictures work best when combined with words to explain them, and words can work better if illustrated and decorated with pictures.  And, including words in your picture is often particular fun and particularly informative.

I have two recorded conversations in the can which need processing before the end of the month, but two parties to attend, this evening and, of course, tomorrow evening.  So, I need something quick and dirty up here now, to enable me to work on those recordings without time pressure, and still be able to go partying.

So, something that really doesn’t matter and which I therefore don’t care about getting rather wrong.  I know: cricket.

England have just lost the Ashes, and are now heading for a five-nil whitewash, the first Ashes whitewash in Australia by Australia, since 1723 or whenever.

Boycott and Agnew were on the telly at the end of the most recent slaughter, number four in the present series, saying that England are not trying hard enough.  The England camp are adamant that they are trying like hell.

I tend to believe the England camp and to disbelieve their critics, at any rate on that particular point.  England are trying hard all right.  Their problem is that no matter what they do, and no matter how hard they try, they are not succeeding.  This makes them despondent, and when in the field now, or when batting now, and not surprisingly, they look despondent.  But this despondence is not a consequence of their waining desire to be successful.  It is the consequence of precisely the fact that they do want to be successful, but can’t manage it.

If they weren’t so sad about it all, they actually wouldn’t now be in such a death spiral, because their earlier defeats wouldn’t matter to them that much.  They’d just carry on playing in the same old way.  As it is, because they care so much, their morale is now in tatters, and as Boycott rightly said, they are actually now getting worse and worse.

The killer was game two, where England clocked up over five hundred, declared and took early Australian wickets, but then after Australia had climbed to a similar total, England rolled over in their second innings and lost.  If we lost from that position, they must have felt, we can lose from any position.  We will never be safe from impending slaughter.  Meanwhile, the Aussies learned that, no matter how tricky things may look at any particular moment, one further bout of pom-bashing will (a) probably happen and (b) win them the game.

In slaughter four the horror of slaughter two repeated itself, but earlier in the game.  England crumpled in their first innings on day one, but Australia then semi-crumpled themselves, to eighty odd for five.  Okay, one of those five was a nightwatchman, but still, the game look vaguely, you know, “poised”.  But then Hayden and Symonds hit big hundreds and it was game over.  Australia had lost Langer for very little, and then Ponting, Hussey and Clarke and (immediately after the big stand) Gilchrist all got out for single figures.  Between them those five top class batters made less than fifty.  Yet still, Australia won by an innings.

England are definitely weaker than they were when winning the 2005 Ashes.  No Simon Jones.  Vaughan not available to captain.  Flintoff wounded.  Trescothick out of it.  Harmison in continuing decline, having already, actually, been on the slide during the 2005 Ashes win by England.  That England won those Ashes with Harmison only once making much impact, on the first morning of the first game (which England lost), is extraordinary.

Even more extraordinary, as my Aussie friend Michael Jennings said when it happened and ever since, is that England won the 2005 Ashes despite Shane Warne taking forty wickets.

Australia lost that 2005 series (a) because England for long periods played out of their skins.  They lost (b) because, I insist, despite “outplaying” Australia a lot (but not always), England were very, very lucky.  If cover had been five yards either way at the death of game two it would have been two-nil to Australia, and the catch behind the wicket that followed to give England a win by two runs looked very iffy.  Later, England did one of their last day crumbles on the way to winning their second victory and nearly cocked that up also.  At the time England fans were telling me that England’s last day crumble then didn’t signify, as if playing badly only counts if you do it on the first day.  Well, in that decisive second game of this current Ashes series, England on the last day crumbled again, and since they needed sixty more runs than they did in that earlier 2005 game, this last day crumble cost them the match, and any hope of making a serious fight of the series.

And Australia lost the 2005 Ashes (c) because, great though he is, the one and only Shane Warne couldn’t do it entirely on his own against a very decent England side.  His was the only world-class Australian performance in that 2005 series.  The rest of the Australian team just didn’t do well enough.  McGrath, having won the first game for Australia, trod on a ball just before game two and was never the same again, and their back-up quicks (now replaced) also failed.  Their batting (now similarly beefed up) also stuttered against excellent bowling from Flintoff, Hoggard and Simon Jones.

And one might add (d) that England lost in 2006/7 because their bowlers have never been so good in Australia as they are in England.  I remember a nightmare series in Australia in 1958/9, when England - with Trueman(!!!), Statham(!!), Tyson(!!), Laker(!!!) and Lock(!) (plus Loader and the useful if unthreatening Trevor Bailey to back them up) doing the bowling – which England, having won gloriously (i.e. 2-1) in England in 1956, lost in Australia 4-0.  This kind of thing has happened before.

Finally, it comes down to Warne, the greatest bowler ever, in my opinion and that of many, many others.

The outstanding test match batsman ever is another Australian, Bradman.  Bradman didn’t play that much test cricket, compared to what the best batsmen play nowadays, if only because of World War 2, and many later test batsman have scored many more runs than Bradman did.  But Bradman’s batting average shoots off the top of the page.  The best of the rest of the test match batters have averages of fifty or sixty or thereabouts.  Bradman averaged as near as dammit - i.e. four instead of the duck that he actually got in his very last innings - a hundred.

Warne’s statistical pre-eminence is most obviously that, as of now, he has taken the most test match wickets: 706 with just one match to go.  But Muttiah Muralitharan of Sri Lanka is not far behind on 674 and rising, and Warne’s average is not that wonderful.  He doesn’t even register on this list, for instance, which is the list of people with bowling averages of less than 25.  (Murali, with an average of just under 22 makes that list in fine style.)

Except that Warne’s bowling average, of just over 25, actually is rather wonderful, because he is a leg break bowler.

Usually spin bowlers can do one of two things.  They can bowl accurately and spin it only a bit, unless the pitch is helping them a lot.  Think: Monty Panesar.  Or they can spin it a lot, even if the pitch is not much help, but bowl rather inaccurately.  Think: just about every spin bowler who ever spun it a lot.  Warne spins it a lot, even on the most unhelpful pitches, and he is amazingly accurate.

One record that Warne will probably not lose to Murali is his current record for the most maiden overs bowled by a bowler in test match cricket: 1760.  That statistic, more than any other, and when you put it beside his most wickets by a bowler total, see above, captures the magic of Warne.  He is the bowling equivalent of what captains are reputed to tell batsmen: play your shots, but don’t get out.  Warne takes wickets, but doesn’t give away runs.  And, being a leg break bowler instead of a quick bowler, he can keep going for hour after hour, and for year after year.  Even now, with his retirement announced, he is still right at the top of his game and looks good enough to carry on for a few more years yet.  (My guess is there’s a back story there, involving family, but what do I know?) Actually, Warne will be carrying on for a couple more years, for Hampshire, and it will be extremely interesting to see how well he does for them, given that this will now be the only outlet for his still amazing abilities.

What all of the above has meant for the teams facing Australia is that, basically, what with Australia’s fast bowlers tending to be pretty good also (McGrath etc.), there are, against Australia, no easy runs.

Most test match bowling attacks – England’s current bowling attack is a typical example – have stretches when they are quite menacing, but other periods when they are on the defensive, waiting while front line bowlers either rest or bowl less fiercely, and for the new ball to arrive.  (Think Hayden and Symonds flogging it to all parts, after Australia had been 84-5.) But when Warne is bowling against you, there will be no respite.  Every over you ever face against these damned guys is going to be a struggle.  The fast bowlers, knowing that whatever strong position they establish in the early stages of an innings will be exploited rather than frittered away by tired or second-rank bowlers later in the innings, can exhaust themselves, confident that they probably won’t have to bowl again before they have recovered their puff.  Meanwhile the batsman are dispirited from the get-go by the prospect of having to fight like savages for every run they will ever make.  So, even if Warne eventually walks off the pitch with, I don’t know, 15 overs 4 maidens 55 runs 1 wicket, he has still contributed mightly, just by being there.  And of course it is just as likely to be 25 overs 9 maidens 45 runs 4 wickets, or 5 or 6 or 7.  In the most recent game, Warne’s first innings analysis, on the first day (when the wicket was only supposed to be helping the quick bowlers), was: 17.2 overs 4 maidens 39 runs 5 wickets.

The thing is, England are by no means a hopelessly bad side, as I fully expect them to prove next summer back in England against whoever it is that they will then be playing.  Their test match ranking, right up until this latest debacle, was: 2!  (Their one-day ranking is a different story.) The huge stand by Pietersen and Collingwood in game two this time around was, especially for the Warne-related reasons just explained, a truly wonderful achievement.  Panesar got five wickets on his debut in game three.  Flintoff, Hoggard and (yes) Harmison did reduce Australia to 84-5 in the most recent game.  But wonderful for a half a day or even for a couple of days against this Australian side, with Warne firing on all cylinders, and some of the others always doing something else terrific, is just not good enough.

I repeat Michael Jennings’s point.  The surprise is not that England are now losing.  It is that, despite the presence of Warne at his best in 2005, they managed, just, to scrape a series win.  That was the big surprise.  Especially after that first 2005 game, which was extremely similar to what is now happening in Australia, and after which the Australians were justifiably optimistic that they might be about to make that series 5-0.  This Samizdata posting of mine, from just before the 2005 Ashes series got under way, now makes interesting reading, to me anyway.  I see that I made then many of the Warne points I have made again here.

This time, if Australia don’t make it 5-0, it will be a miracle.

So much for quick and dirty.  That was long, and actually quite clean.  It’s only a game, Brian.  Only a game. 

Coincidentally, while I was concocting the day before yesterday’s post about solo Bach on the violin, a violinist emailed to plug a violin show of his in London on January 4th, which I am going to try to go to.

I’m not sure that it will be entirely to my taste, for whatever that may matter.  My preferences in violin playing veer away from the kind of pieces where they put a flower next to the violin on the CD cover.  Too chocolate boxy for me.  And judging by this lo-fi mp3 snippet , Simon Hewitt Jones’s preferred new stuff also sounds rather too chocolate boxy for me as well.  As far as contemporary violin composing goes, I fancy a more busking-in-the-tube kind of style – more gutsy and rhythmic, like a cross between Bartok and drumless rock and roll, or something.  But I am interested anyway, because at least the guy is putting himself about, and above all, making maximum use of the internet to do that.

I have a lot more respect for violinists like Vanessa-Mae Nicholson and Nigel Kennedy (whose fiftieth birthday was yesterday by the way), than a lot of music critics seem to have.  The answers that Vanessae-Mae and Kennedy offer may not always be entirely convincing, but at least they are asking the right question: Where next for virtuoso violinists?  I mean, never mind the Beethoven and Brahms concertos, the first of the Shostakovich concertos seems to get about one new recording a month these days.  Hahn, Chang, Josefowicz, Skride, Hope, Khachatryan, they just keep on coming.  These are all very fine performances, but these regular super-violinists are now deep into the land of diminishing returns - financially, artistically, and in terms of their overall contribution to the culture.  I buy all such CDs, but only when I encounter them second hand for three quid which won’t pay their rent.  The fact that new CDs now take no time to get to the bargain boxes that I see in the market, and at three quid straight away rather than eight quid like it was only a few years ago, says something, I think.  These people used to be able to make a living from their recording contracts.  Now their CDs are mere calling cards.  But calling cards for what?  Something has to give.  Both Vanessa-Mae and Kennedy, in their different ways, are trying to see what might.

Besides which, what’s wrong with looking nice in a wet T-shirt?

Lots of other violin virtuosi are like Vanessa-Mae in also being very young and sexy.  A common explanation for this is that the public only likes young and sexy violin virtuosi, like it only likes young and sexy film stars.  But the violin virtuosi are also young and sexy because they are still young (and sexy because young) enough to be trying to make a go of their careers in the regular virtuoso way, but mostly failing.  When they grow up, they will mostly give up, because the sums don’t add up.  More fundamentally, what are they actually achieving?

So then what do they do?  That’s the question.  Then what?  (Teach?  That’s not an answer.  That merely relocates the question.) Then what? is one of my favourite questions.  Then what? when what we’re doing now fails, obviously.  Then what? when what we’re doing now succeeds is more interesting.  This is the predicament of the classical music profession now.  They have recorded everything, superbly, bar the final ten percent of barrel scraping, and since recording is now so cheap and so easy, they might as well go on recording everything.  But they can’t hit the big time with such recordings any more, the way you could if yours was only the first or the second recording of whatever you are doing, or for that matter only the fifth or tenth.  So, what next?

Simon Hewitt Jones is already deep into that question, either because they won’t let him be a regular famous virtuoso with a nice if not massive recording contract, or because he has chosen not to go that way even if he could.  Clearly the Internet is a huge part of the new answer, hence the obvious interestingness of something called ViolinMP3.com, which turns out to have a blog written by Simon HJ at the front of it, which, although I’m only guessing, it probably makes more sense to read here.  (Straight to the blogroll with that.  Although, alas, the monthly archiving seems not to work.  Not for me, anyway.  I could find my way to things eventually though, by hoping backwards via the “recent postings” option.)

If I do manage to get to that Jan 4 show, I will be especially listening out for the new compositions, because acquiring new repertoire is now the key issue for classically trained musicians.  The best of them can scrape a living playing the same old stuff, but it is new and popular stuff that now matters, economically and artistically, as V-M and Kennedy have realised, and it is the composers of new and popular stuff, or the star commissioners of such new and popular stuff, who are the potential leaders of the classical music profession.  This wasn’t true in 1960, because then what mattered was recording the back catalogue in super stereo.  It didn’t matter how few people loved Boulez’s latest.  But now, the economics of the classical music business hinges on the attractiveness to audiences of the new stuff.  Whether the music itself gets called “classical” or something else is a bit of a detail, and it would probably be better if the regular classical critics were thrown into a paroxysm of indecision about that.  That would suggest that something real was happening.

You may be wondering: why did it take until now (Simon HJ has been blogging since March of 2005) for me to clock this guy?  Why did it take an email from Simon Hewitt Jones to me for me to find out about all this?  Well, it just did, would be one answer.  But a slightly better one might be to say that I find internetting very hard and that I plunged into blogging because it is the only kind of internetting that I find relatively easy and find to be relatively quickly rewarded (what with me being a writer who is still at the giving-it-away-to-attract-attention stage).  So, I started blogging, about classical music and about lots of other things, but I still don’t do much else of an internetted nature, such as iTuning or YouTubing or EBaying or Amazoning or Flickring or MySpacing, or anything else interesting that I might be doing if I were better at such things than I am.  But, nevertheless, Simon Hewitt Jones picked me up on his radar scanner, which is clearly far superior to mine, as part of his plugging of his Jan 4th event, and the connection was made.  By him.  But who cares?  I am now permanently tuned in to what Simon HJ and co. are doing, and very pleased I am about it.

(One reason why Simon HJ is better at internetting than I am is that he has a clever techy/musician younger(?) brother.  It’s a pity that the link at the top of this posting no longer works.  I tried internet-researching brother Thomas and learned not much, but I did encounter this.)

In his email Simon HJ mentioned that he was at the same school as Alex Singleton (i.e. Dulwich), with whom I do classical internet chats.  “Alex probably won’t remember me” blah blah, said Simon HJ, because he is younger than Alex.  But in fact Alex does remember him.  If you are a star violinist, a lot of the people you shared a school with will remember you, even if you are younger than them. 

Plus, I have a feeling that of the other people in my immediate circle, this lady might also be particularly interested in Simon HJ’s activities, not so much because of the music as because of the internetting and blogging that goes with it.  She likes almost anything, if internetting and blogging goes with it.

Alex and I will be going on Jan 4, I hope.  If any of our London friends and acquaintances are interested in joining us and making a bigger party, they should get in touch.  Soon.  I don’t want to leave it too late.

Alex Singleton and I are doing our G&S chat this afternoon, and I am therefore still doing homework for that.

This Times article by John Carey strikes me as very good:

But escaping into a never-never land for an evening’s entertainment is not the same as suffering from existential angst or harbouring revolutionary urges. Mike Leigh, whose 1999 film Topsy-Turvy, about the Gilbert and Sullivan partnership, Topsy-Turvy, won two Oscars, and the gratitude of all G&S lovers, claims in his introduction that Gilbert was a “true anarchist” and a “proto-surrealist” who “anticipated the Theatre of the Absurd”. These seem shaky ideas. To treat the Savoy operas as a kind of chrysalis-phase in history’s triumphant advance towards André Breton or Ionesco bespeaks a naive belief in progress, and to imagine that Gilbert would have had any truck with anarchism is bizarre. The crucial fact about the Savoy operas is that they express the jubilant power of what was then the world’s top nation. They are as patriotic as Rule Britannia and as Victorian as the Albert Memorial. Author and audience both revelled in the knowledge that Britain was supreme, that herits [sic] army and navy were matchless, and that sheit [sic] ruled an empire on which the sun never set. Modern intellectuals may find these facts shameful and indecent, but that just means they should steer clear of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Quite so.  Gilbert may have anticipated the Theatre of the Absurd, but that wasn’t what he thought he was doing.

But “herits”?  And “sheit”?  Later there is a “thatwho” twinned with a “theirits”.  Well, you can see how itthat happened.  “Oh, Iwe’ll decide about thatthose later.” And then heshethey forgot.  I can remember when the Times was a great institution.  The “Thunderer”.  Some other nickname, perhaps involving two alternative versions of the same word, will perhapsmaybe have to be devisedinvented.  It would seem that when it comes to embarrassing cock-ups and mis-spellings of the sort that many blogs commit routinely, the Big Old Media can do those also.  The Media of the Absurd.

Perry de Havilland has things to say about newspapers, high traffic yet amateur bloggers such as he, and lone, even more traffic-impervious bloggers such as I, pointing out that although some newspapers, in particular the Guardian are doing blogging etc. very well, blogging etc. (in the case of the above article Times “on line") still won’t pay the salaries of all those massed ranks of print journos.  Those salaries date from the age of printed and broadcast message scarcity, in which a show which was definitely better than the others attracted the attention of millions because what else was there?  This age is now ending.

Many people only experience all this as a decline of standards, because all they see is the Big Old Media getting more voluminous (in ways they aren’t used to, like on the Internet or via lots of digital TV and radio channels, or free newspapers full of trash), and yet mostly worse.

Regular telly is now, for me, the worst it’s ever been, if all I ever wanted to do was watch the telly.  But who wants to do that?  Besides which there is now so much of it that if only five percent appeals, that’s still a lot, plus there’s lots of others stuff.  TV is becoming more like books, in other words.  Or, the Internet.  Don’t moan.  Discriminate.  Find what you want.  Don’t bitch about what you don’t want.

I wrote those previous two postings on the 23rd, and kind of set them like bombs to go off at 2 am on the 24th and the 25th.  I didn’t want burglars to know that now (by which I mean then – English can be a strange language) was the time to attack and steal all my beautiful CDs, but now, I wouldn’t want you all think that all I ever do over Christmas is put stuff on my blog.  Although, I did check it, to see that the postings had gone off properly, at my brother’s.  But, burglars and humans, I am now back at the blog face.

One CD that burglars would, had they struck, have missed out on was my newly acquired set of the Bach for solo violin pieces by John Holloway, which I heard a bit of on CD review and gave myself, at something well on the way to full price, for Christmas.  These CDs are fabulous, and I took them with me on my Christmas travels.

I particularly like the rather reverberant recording, done in a church.  What this means is that each note is played in an ambience created by the previous few notes.  It doesn’t sound like the solo violin is battling against its single note and at best double noted limitations, merely expressing itself with great confidence, like an on-form pianist or orchestra.

It helps that Holloway comes to this music from having earlier recorded other solo violin pieces written at the same time as and just before these Bach pieces.  Bach is often played in a way that is too unspectacular, too lacking in special effects and in all round drama and pzazz.  But Bach’s contemporaries didn’t listen to this music saying: “But of course, Beethoven will be even more dramatic.” They just said, or words to this effect: “Wow.”

Which is also my basic reaction to these Holloway performances.  This page is record company puff, but I agree with it all.

Rarely has this music been played so naturally and with seeming effortlessness, with such a commanding knowledge of both formal proportions and idiomatic character. John Holloway, one of the most distinguished baroque violinists of our time, has researched and practiced these works for forty years. Specializing in the repertoire from the baroque period (1600-1750) he perceives Bach in the context of his predecessors and contemporaries - such as composers like Schmelzer, Biber, Veracini (whose works he has presented in highly praised recordings in recent years) rather than in the perspective of romantic and modern violin literature.

For what I think is an all too typical example of that latter tendency, try listening – or rather, I would say, don’t – to the recent and by many critics very well received recordings of these same pieces by Julia Fischer.  Fischer is an excellent specimen of the modern virtuoso, who can play the hind legs off every concerto from Bach to Shostakovich and beyond.  And she brings all that modern virtuoso method to her solo Bach recordings.  But I really did not like them.  All that Brahmsian straining for effect.  But then, hardly anyone sounds as good as Holloway in this music, to my ear.

This is not at all, for me, an authentic-good-modern-bad thing.  I have never heard an “authentic” performance of these pieces that I have liked a tenth as much as Holloway’s, in fact these are the first authentic performances of these things that I have not actively disliked.  Typically, the authenticists yank the notes around something dreadful.  Julia Fischer, who is said to have learned from the authenticists, merely combines modern virtuoso straining for maximum effect with a fatal dash of authentic lumpishness and lack of musical line.  The best I can say for her is that she is perfectly in tune.  But other modern virtuosi - such as Grumiaux, Perlman and (especially) Hilary Hahn - have achieved miracles of unstressed musicality in this music.

But I now think that Holloway is even better.  He really does seem to have some special insight into how this music should be played, and he can really play.  Which is the killer combination.  He combines the musicality of the best modern virtuosi, with the kind of theatricality you usually only get when Bach is being played on the organ.

B is for Brian, for Boxing Day, and for Bentleys:

I like Bentleys, even if I could never tolerate the cost of actually having one.  But now, I don’t need to own stuff, I can just photo it.  This one was parked outside Westminster Abbey.

Boxing Day is Boxing Day because our ancestors used to take boxes of leftover stuff to their neighbours, or give it to their servants, or something.  We don’t do this anymore, but the name stuck.  It’s not anything to do with sport or domestic violence.

Except, I now learn, when it comes to killing wrens.  Scroll down at that Boxing Day link if you don’t believe me.  Ancestors, eh?  What bastards.

Yes, have a nice day everyone.  Here are some Christmassy snaps to divert and entertain, but not to take up a lot of time.

If I remember Christmas 2006 at all (and thanks to this blog I will remember it a little), I will remember it for the fog, and the premature sales.  My favourite Christmas lights pictures this year were taken in the gloom of the later afternoon rather than in darkness.

The star is on top of a Christmas tree outside Parliament, photoed through the railings.  In the middle is New Bond Street, all fog and London greyness.  The lights in that part of town were amazingly feeble, these being among the better ones.  As was the big spread on the front of Debenhams in Oxford Street, and I wasn’t the only one who liked that one.  (I may start a new category of Billion Monkeys in gloves!) The official Oxford Street lights were, I thought, pathetic.

But the real story this Christmas in London was how much prodding from the shops it took to get people to empty their wallets.  A combination of China and those ships brought us a surfeit of stuff and created London’s biggest ever Christmas buyer’s market.  There was an eventual splurge, but only after prices on a lot of stuff had been slashed.  These pix were all taken on December 19th, which was before the serious buying finally got under way.

Here are some rather better lights, on the left inside Habitat, Kings Road, and on the right, with weird inside-of-the-bus reflections thrown in, in Sloane Square.

I like that title, but if this is anything to go by, I think I’ll skip the thing itself.

For every problem, there is a solution:

Have you ever been sitting in front of your computer wishing you could play piano? Well, with this USB Roll-up Piano you can! With its unique roll-up design, the Roll-up Piano can go wherever you go!

This USB Roll-up Piano is the perfect USB Gadget for those that want to get a quick fix of piano playing! Let the music begin, order today!

Thank you engadget, who note that:

The keyboard also has more than 128 different instruments available . . .

As it happens, there are quite a lot of times when I do sit in front of my computer wishing I could play the piano.  But what stops me is not the inability of my piano to roll-up, or its lack of a USB plug.  It is my inability to play the piano, roll-up or otherwise, USB connected or not.

But I see what they are getting at.  If you are already a fluent pianist you could have it with you at all times, together with a equally convenient mobile computer of some kind, to use in restaurants or libraries, or during musical arguments away from home in the course of which you need to illustrate particularly important musical points, during the intervals of concerts for instance.  128 different instruments should suffice for such purposes, although no doubt future models will have 256 or even 512 or 1024 instruments available for use, simultaneously if necessary.

If caught short on the tube without enough money to get home, you could whip it out and busk (provided you are able to sit cross-legged on the floor and reach forward), until the necessary resources have been donated.  A sign saying “I only need three quid” should ensure that you will quickly be on your way.

Alex Singleton and I have just fixed to do our Gilbert and Sullivan chat on Thursday 28th.  So, fingers crossed for that.  Meanwhile, the decision to have fixed topics and a generally more disciplined approach to our ongoing classical music chat project continues to work wonderfully, at any rate for me, even before a recording button has been so much as pressed.  There’s nothing like the chance to show off and the prospect of making a fool of myself to get me doing my homework.

I continue to read Hesketh Pearson Gilbert and Sullivan with extreme pleasure (see also this earlier posting here), and there follows another snippet from that delightful book.  Something I did not know until now was that the premier of The Pirates of Penzance was given in New York, in December 1879.  Gilbert and Sullivan both went there to do their own ‘official’ production of their first big hit, HMS Pinafore, in order to cash in on American enthusiasm for that piece, but American reluctance to bother with copyright law.  And having gone there to do Pinafore, they stayed to do their next collaboration, not at all coincidentally given a title which included the word Pirates.

During recent years, American orchestras have been pricing themselves out of the classical music recording business, and even American classical repertoire has been recorded by cheaper European orchestras, rather then by the ensembles for whom it was originally written.  Well, it seems that this American tendency towards orchestral bolshiness is not new.  Here is Pearson’s account (pp. 90-91 of my 1954 Penguin paperback edition) of the difficulties that Sullivan had with the orchestra of the Fifth Avenue Theatre, where The Pirates had its first performance.

Just before the opening night he had trouble with the band, the members of which voted that The Pirates came under the heading of Grand Opera, which entitled them to higher rates of pay.  The position was not improved by the manager of the theatre, who told them that they should be content with the high honour of being conducted by England’s greatest composer, for it occurred to them that they should be paid more for the high honour as well as for the Grand Opera, and they raised both points when threatening to down instruments. Sullivan adroitly turned the tables on them.  He disclaimed the greatness that had been thrust upon him and said that he felt the honour of conducting such a brilliant orchestra. He even hinted that his work was not worthy of them and that if they felt so too, he should wire at once to England for a less sensitive orchestra.  They agreed to abase themselves on the same terms as before.

That’s pure Sullivan.  On the surface all obligingness and ingratiation, but underneath it a determination to get the job done, albeit with much nerve-wracking and exhaustion- and illness-inducing procrastination and deadline stretching, and to profit from it as much as possible.

Pearson’s account continues:

On the night of 30th December, after the final dress-rehearsal, Sullivan returned to his hotel and began work on the overture, finishing at five o’clock on the morning of the 31st, and rehearsing it six hours later.  He was not well enough to eat that day, so went to bed in the afternoon and tried to sleep.  Still feeling wretchedly ill and worn out with fatigue, for he could not sleep, he rose, dressed slowly, and wandered off to a club, where he had twelve oysters, and a glass of champagne.  More dead than alive, he went on to the theatre, took his place in the orchestra, lifted his baton, and The Pirates of Penzance swept New York off its feet.

A composer-conductor’s lot is not a happy one, or not the way Sullivan did it.  But when the first performance of a new Gilbert and Sullivan opera began, Sullivan’s agony tended to end, with Doctor Music chasing away his miseries, at least while the show lasted.

But for Gilbert, who took care of everything on the stage, the worst part of his ordeal would then begin.  He would pace about outside, doing all manner of weird and irrelevant things, returning only at the end of the show to learn how it had gone, and to join with Sullivan in accepting the applause, which was generally tumultuous.

New haircuts seem to be everywhere right now.  My friend Adriana the Media Influencer felt that she would be better able to influence media if she had her hair cut.  Here’s how she looked and looks, before and after:

As you can see she looked good before.  But it is a definite change of image.

Meanwhile, I too had earlier undergone an equally definite change of hairdo.  Here’s the Before and After of how that alteration has worked itself out:

Again there are pluses and minuses to be noted on both sides.  The Before look said: Here is someone who said what he meant and meant what he said.  Why else would I have said it?  Obviously, no one was paying me.  The After look is all very affluent and sexy, but does that well-groomed surface make much of a statement?  Is their substance behind that sleek exterior?

Despite such reservations, I feel, on balance, more at ease with my new look.

One of the more damaging assumptions you can make is to assume that everyone is like you, with the same values, ambitions, preoccupations and interests as you have.

In my career counselling I constantly come up against this assumption, and with careers it can be very damaging.

For instance, suppose you want to be a brain surgeon.  Fine.  No problem about that.  If that’s what you want, that’s what you want.  But suppose you assume, without even thinking about it, that everyone else in the world also wants to be a brain surgeon, merely because you cannot imagine anyone not wanting to be a brain surgeon.  President Bush?  Failed brain surgeon.  Mick Jagger?  Only joined the Stones when Brain Surgery School threw him out.  Madonna?  She’s so weird because she really wanted to be a brain surgeon but they wouldn’t let her.  That shopkeeper with the idiot grin on his face all day long, who does he think he’s kidding?  He really wants to be a brain surgeon, but he’s not!  What a loser!  Your dad?  A failure.  Having failed to make it in brain surgery, he had to make do with becoming the assistant head of Microsoft. 

You can see how that kind of thinking would give you a rather distorted view of other people, other people’s states of mind, and of the world generally.

And when it comes to your own career, the assumption that everyone else is just like you and wants just what you want leads inexorably to the following conclusion: You have virtually no chance of becoming what you really want to be, because you are competing with the entire rest of the world.

But you aren’t.  Most people do not want what you want.  Or what I want.

These thoughts were triggered by my only posting here on Wednesday, which was a link to this.  I got that link from Iain Dale, who is a British political blogger of tremendous grandeur with far more readers than me.  I thought: Is this posting adding anything?  I thought: Does anyone in the world read me, and not read Iain Dale?  But of course, there are quite a few such people.  I am interested in everything that Iain Dale writes just now, and I am always fascinated to read whatever emerges from my own keyboard.  But not everyone is like me.  Many like Iain Dale, and shun me.  But, by the same token, others ignore Iain Dale, but read me, if only because he goes on and on about British Conservative politics, and I don’t.

One such person linked to that posting of mine.  He didn’t credit Iain Dale for drawing his attention to that mobile map of Middle Eastern history.  He credited me.  For which much thanks, of course.  (He also linked to this posting, ditto.)

And the blogging moral is that no matter how popular you think one of your favourite blogs might be, there is a universe of people out there who have no interest in it, but a few of whom are nevertheless fond of your little blog.  So if Mr MegaInstaAlistPundit writes something, or links to something, that you think is really cool, and you say that on your tiny little blog which oscillates wildly and unpredictability between kittens (or your own preferred alternative to kittens) and your favourite variety of politics or anti-politics, some people – not necessarily very many people, but some people - will be hearing about that particular item of coolness for the first time.  And some of those some people may actually agree with you that it is indeed cool.

My search for the perfect mobile computer continues.  (Remember this.)

The other day, while wandering along Tottenham Court Road, London’s electronic retail superhighway, I spotted the catchily titled ASUS R2U-BH040T, in the window of MicroAnvika.

We’re nearly there.  This would be quite a good holiday computer, with the capacity to write, internet (presumably, although I’m not sure of all of the ramifications of that, e.g. cost), and view photos.  The screen is 7 inches wide, the hard disc is 60gb, and there is an SD card slot.  Behind the screen is where the action is, and the thing is still rather heavy.  Plus, I don’t like that the screen is somewhat small compared to the thing itself, like an early laptop.  But, the keyboard is nice, and folds easily in the middle, like a Christmas card.

And unlike that Samsung gizmo, it is available to Londoners.  But, too expensive.  It costs about £700.  I want this kind of thing for £400 and preferably nearer to £200.

Yes, phab photos by Fabio, whoever Fabio is.  I went from this posting . . .

. . . at the Londonist, to the Fabio original on Flickr, and clicked through his London pix until I found another that I really like . . .

At which point I stopped, because I have a life, or like to think that I have.

But, see also London by lots of different people, and architecture ditto.

I really should get properly Flickred.

Iain Dale links to this instant history of the Middle East.  Very fine.

I have a whole clutch of the Penguin Atlases of Ancient History, Medieval History, Modern History, American History, etc., and they’re really good, with lots of verbiage of course, but this communicates much more in far less time.

That’s if you can get hold of it.  I got it when I first wrote this, but then when checking the link moments later I got an error message.  And some of Iain Dale’s commeters report similarly.  My advice is: keep trying.

UPDATE: Moments after moments later, I got through.